Fermi and Black Widow Pulsars

Colloquium: Astronomy Colloquia | October 18 | 4 p.m. | 2 LeConte Hall

Speaker/Performer: Roger Romani, Stanford

Sponsor: Department of Astronomy

'Black Widows' are pulsars that are annihilating the companions that gave them a new lease on life. Such cosmic ingratitude was held to be rare, but the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has uncovered a swarm of energetic pulsars vaporizing their partners. It seems that this is a relatively common, but hidden, end-point of close binary evolution, and key to understanding the millisecond pulsar population. Our study suggests that even more outrageous systems may be flagged in the Fermi sky. I describe first results of a search for these objects, including the discovery of PSR J1311-3430, the most extreme black widow yet, with an ultra-heavy neutron star whittling a companion down to planetary mass.

Event Contact: rhelgens@astro.berkeley.edu, 510-642-5275